Website offers CSA matchmaking for Champlain Valley localvores

Apr. 11, 2013

Written by

Free Press Staff Writer

I recently wrote a Savorvore story about the challenge of choosing a farm share that fits your family’s food preferences, budget, schedule and location.

Now comes Luc Reid of Williston with help for Champlain Valley residents looking for the right community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm. That’s the system of food purchases in which you pay in advance for a (usually) weekly share of what a particular farm produces in a season.

Reid has designed an online CSA matchmaker to help a family think through its priorities and find a farm in the region that fits with those needs and wants.

Do you need a share that is delivered to your town? Must the vegetables be produced organically? Are you looking for a spring share or summer deliveries? Do you need a CSA that has a sliding scale of prices based on income?

In an easy to follow series of screens, users answer those questions and more. The site then provides a list of farms that match your answers. Click on the name of a farm for more details plus links to the farm’s website and email.

Reid, a database designer for a Montpelier company, put his technology skills to work a couple of months ago, searching online directories maintained by the state Agriculture Agency and NOFA-Vermont. He improved on those sometimes out-of-date listings with information from CSAs’ websites and assembled it into the matchmaker database.

“Really the driving motivation behind it is to contribute to more sustainable food systems in Vermont,” Reid said. He’s particularly interested in helping reduce the transportation and packaging costs involved in food purchases, one contribution to fighting climate change.

He said his own family joined a winter CSA in Montpelier and a summer CSA in Burlington, but “it was really difficult to search out and identify CSAs, and then to compare them side-by-side.”

Reid is the organizer of Champlain Valley Localsourcers, a group of people “who want to learn how to eat locally, solve problems, save money, share ideas and information, discover new sources of local food and products, fight climate change, or just eat the freshest food available,” according to the organization’s website.

I gave the matchmaker a whirl this week, checking off boxes for a summer share, including poultry, from an organic farm, with a Burlington pickup point.

The matchmaker popped up three choices, all of which might work for me. But the process wasn’t perfect. The matches did not include a fourth farm that I know meets all my criteria.

Reid acknowledges the database’s imperfections, saying he continues to refine and improve it as he gathers more information from the 35 farms he has identified. He would like to expand geographically as well, he said, but to get started, “The Champlain Valley was plenty of work.”

To use the CSA matchmaker, go to www.localsource.me and click on “CSAs”. The site also includes listing of local food events.

Candace Page retired Thursday from the Burlington Free Press. Contact her at pagecandace@gmail.com and follow her at www.twitter.com/CandacePage. You can still hear Candace and other Savorvore writers on VPR Café, Sunday mornings at 10:45 a.m. on Vermont Public Radio.